Are you currently unemployed and you are looking for a business to start, so as to earn an extra income? Do you have the passion and skill for teaching? Do you love interacting with people? Are you good at transferring skill and knowledge? If your answer to the questions above is yes, then you should consider starting a tutoring business.
Now what is tutoring? Tutoring is simply all about teaching or sharing your knowledge with an individual or group of individuals. Thus, a tutoring business is simply the act of sharing your knowledge in return for a fee or profit.
To start a tutoring business, one prerequisite you must possess is passion. You must love teaching because if you don’t, you will see tutoring as a stressful and difficult task. Now why should you start a tutoring business and who should start a tutoring business?
Well, tutoring is a service that anybody can do, provided you have a specific skill or adequate knowledge about a particular subject; and you have the ability or passion to share this knowledge with others.
Six Reasons why you should start a tutoring business
- Tutoring is a service business that can be started with virtually no money. All you need is to be knowledgeable about your chosen field and be good at teaching.
- You can start this business from home and take on private clients based on contract basis. You can even do this business over the internet as there is a growing need for online linguistic tutors. You can teach several subjects (English language, Chinese, French, Mathematics) on the web using video tutorials.
- Being a tutor will help you to improve on your daily vocabulary and also boost your public speaking skills.
- Tutoring is a profitable business to run as parents are in the habit of enrolling their kids in extra moral classes to improve the kid’s performance.
- Your tutoring business can help empower people through the distribution of knowledge and employment
- A tutoring business is one that advertises itself as parents and kids help spread the word about your business through referral or word of mouth.
- The market and demand for tutors can never be saturated. This is because there exist, a wide category of subjects or professional courses that you can take on
Starting a Tutoring Business – Sample Business Plan Template
1. Study the business and the education industry
Before venturing into tutoring business, you must first understand what tutoring or teaching entails. You must study the education trend in your local community and country at large. After that, you then need to figure out the level of demand within your region.
2. Conduct feasibility study and write a business plan
After taking time to study the educational needs within your environment, you need to conduct feasibility study and write a business plan. Your business plan must include a vision and mission statement, marketing strategy, technical analysis, management team and strategy, financial projections, etc. Writing a business plan will make you define your new business by answering these few questions:
- What services will you offer to the people?
- Where will your tutoring business take place?
- Where will you get customers?
- How will you position and market yourself?
- Who will do the tutoring, assessing, managing and answering of phone calls?
- How will your company grow and how big will you like it to be?
3. Register your business
After carrying out feasibility and writing a business plan, it is now time to implement your plan. A good way to begin is to register your business, open up a bank account for it, and print business cards. You might also need to obtain a license before commencing operation.
A tutoring license is a legal document that will permit you to offer tutorial classes and services. To get this, you need to be a professional tutor, and you may also need to be a bachelor’s degree holder or hold an equivalent qualification on the specific course you intend to tutor on. To scale this hurdle without much ado, you can choose to hire a consultant or join an organization like; National Tutoring Association (NTA).
4. Choose the best location for your tutorial center
Where is the best place to locate a tutorial center? Well, the best place to site your tutoring business is a region that is well populated with children that goes to school. This would only work if academic students are your target market. Another pointer is that your tutorial center must be sited far away from the busy roads, hotels, and markets; so as to avoid distractions while tutoring your students.
Now it is important you know that you don’t need to go through the hassles of finding a place to house your business if you intend to work from home and offer your services to your clients in their respective houses.
5. Raise capital for your tutoring business
The amount or cost of setting up a tutoring business will depend on the scale and approach you intend to take. If you intend to run your tutorship business as a home based business, you may need an estimate of less than $500 to $2,000 as capital.
But if you intend to go big, then you will need to rent a space and employee competent hands. Taking this approach may cost you an estimate of $2,000 to $10,000, depending on the location of your center, the rent, and the salary scale of your employees.
To raise the needed capital for your business, you can consider using your savings; especially if you are starting small. You can also borrow money from family and friends,take a bank loan or apply for government grants.
6. Buy the necessary equipment you need
Running a tutoring business does not require much equipment especially when you are starting small. However, you may need to purchase the following if you intend to start on a medium or large scale.
- White Board
- Business cards
- Pens and pencils
- Exercise books
- Text books
- Chairs and desks
- Computer and software
- Internet access and email accounts
- Projectors
- Transcription software
- Headset and microphone
- Web camera
- Telephone
7. Market your tutoring services
It is a known fact that no business can survive without marketing. There are several ways you can market your tutoring services without breaking the bank. Listed below are some of them:
- Setup a Blog on the web and use it to stay in touch with your existing customers
- Advertise your services in community newspapers and magazines
- Give out your business cards at any given opportunity
- Print handbills or flyers and distribute them
- Going to radio and television stations and talk about your services
- Start conducting free tutorials to give people a taste of your intellectual capability
- Connect with your prospective clients on social media
- Contact colleges or high schools and partner with them
- Think outside the box. Be creative!!!
8. Four Challenges of starting a tutoring business
- Finding customers
Tutoring is a service business that entails exchanging your knowledge for money. Now the big question is: how do you get people to trust that you are competent enough to deliver? Well, the honest truth is that you can’t. However, you can allow your prospective clients assess you and decide for themselves by offering your services for free, especially when you are just starting out.
- Finding quality tutors
The first challenge you are going to face if you decide to grow big is to find competent and passionate tutors. There are many tutors but getting a good tutor that will passionately teach your students is quite a challenge. To get a good tutor, you may need to offer an excellent compensation and make their work easy.
- Raising Capital
Capital will always pose a challenge especially to startup entrepreneurs. Now with respect to overcoming the challenge of funding, there is no set rule or laid down path. You just have to find the money by any legal means necessary.
- Managing the business
Running a tutoring business is definitely not an easy task especially when you are tutoring students or youngsters. Some tutoring companies that start small don’t know how difficult it is to start, organize the company and make it grow. A learning centre with 2 – 4 tutors is easy to manage but when the tutors are more and students are many it is not always easy.
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